Ian Louis Harris

Pick Of The Pops Top Three, 5th November 1967

As I write, it is 50 years ago to the day since Sunday 5th November 1967.

On that day, my father and I recorded Hare and Guy Fawkes, Ogblogged here, on our family’s trusty Grundig TK-35.

Grundig TK35; built to last. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.

Our machine was still playing (although not recording) when I let the scrap merchants take it to a better place in 2012.

The very end of the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording segues rather elegantly into the top three from Pick of the Pops:

Zabadak by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich

…which is followed by…

Massachusetts by The Bee Gees

…and then…

Baby Now That I’ve Found You by The Foundations.

With the excitable tones of Alan “Fluff” Freeman between the tracks.

I have split the audio track into parts, but if you run the files contiguously they run entirely unbroken.

The segue works so well, I can only surmise that dad was experimenting with that recording after we had made the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording.

I am pretty sure I must have been watching him carefully and working out what it took to rig up the radio to the tape recorder and record from the radio.

The next 20+ seconds of tape is taken up with “gunk”, as I describe it in subsequent notes, which I think is my early attempts to work out to record, stop, pause etc. some done that evening, the rest the next day or just a few days later.

The following week I recorded the whole of the top nine from Pick of The Pops. I’ll up that material next week.

Don’t try to compare these charts with anything you see from the Official Charts; the BBC Pick Of the Pops charts didn’t work that way in 1967; they tried to second guess the chart standings by making a “chart of charts” from the NME, Melody Maker and several other chart sources which would all be published on different days and different ways. But the only logical dates for my recordings are 5 November 1967 top three, some gunk in between and then the 12 November 1967 top nine.

After that, I recorded a whole load of other pop music stuff to fill up that side of the tape.

It could only have been me making those recordings after the initial part of the 5th November recording; the cutting and hacking about is too amateurish to have been dad or mum. I also remember mum telling me in later years their mixture of horror and pleasure when they discovered me making my own clandestine recordings.

The reason this particular spool survived is because of the Hare and Guy Fawkes recording and also some other material which dad wanted to keep on the other side of the tape.

Most of the recordings I made as a child would have been wiped by subsequent recordings I made as a child. Tape wasn’t cheap.

There is one other tape of similar vintage that survived; with Pick Of The Pops from August 1968. Those recordings include Fluff Freeman’s fabulous chart rundowns, which the 1967 recordings sadly lack.

I’ll up the August 1968 ones when they reach their 50th birthday.

In the meantime, pop pickers, hit the above MP3 files for the Pick of The Pops top three.

Tara.

Hare And Guy Fawkes, Daddy Reading To Me, 5 November 1967

This recording is the only clearly dated family recording I have. Little me proudly announces at the start of the recording that it is the 5th of November, 1967.

I am Ogblog-publishing the recording on its 50th birthday.

As it happens, both the original recording and its 50th anniversary fell/fall on a Sunday.

I have already Ogblogged Dad reading me The Gingerbread Man story – click here – and there are several other such recordings, one or two with mum, which I shall Ogblog in time.

But those others are, I believe, all quite a bit earlier than this Hare and Guy Fawkes one. I believe this 5 November 1967 one is the last of the readings tapes, not least because I think my personal interest in the tape recorder transformed at that time from passive listener to active recorder on our trusty Grundig TK-35. Another story – I’ll cover that story a little more below and separately later.

Grundig TK35. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.

Before we made the recording, almost certainly we would have taken family lunch at Folman’s Restaurant in Noel Street – click here to see a photo of that place. It was an enormous restaurant which looked like a massive refectory inside.

Folman’s – scraped from : https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/534521049506003800/

Grandma Anne had, I think, fairly recently been widowed for a second time (my Step-Grandpa Nat I only recall vaguely from when I was very small), so it became our habit to take Grandma Anne to that strictly kosher restaurant in Soho for Sunday lunch.

I recall liking the chicken soup and the chopped liver but not much else there. I also recall my father’s favourite dish being “boiled capon” – a large chicken cooked in broth. I don’t believe that the kosher restaurant capon was a castrated bird – I’m not sure that kashrut would allow even the circumcision of a cock of the poultry variety. I think it was simply a big old boiler chicken that would make a tasty broth; the slow cooking of the aged creature would soften what would otherwise be rather tough meat.

My Vietnamese-style dish, chicken cooked in its own broth, is an exotic and delicious variation on that theme, which Janie and I love as comfort food. I remember distinctly not liking the Folman’s version much as a child, it was nothing like as tasty as my mum’s chicken.

But I wildly digress.

On the recording, you can hear my mum in the background, in another room, having an argument by the sound of it. I’m not sure whether she is arguing on the phone or with someone else who is in the house who is talking far more softly than my mum. I might do some audio-forensics on the sound file one day and see if I can listen in on that aggro from 50 years ago.

The argument can only have been family stuff…probably family business stuff.

I’ll guess that the Hare and Guy Fawkes story-telling at that time was as much about getting me out of the way while the family argument played out as it was about anything else.

But I’ll also guess that my beady-little eyes were, at that time, working out how to make recordings, because the rest of that side of that tape is strewn with recordings from the radio. One of those recordings I believe was made the same afternoon/early evening; I’ll Ogblog that a little later today.

As with our other story book recordings, I ring a bell at the turn of the page. I think the idea of that was to help me learn to read by following the story in the book while listening to the tape.

I also interject with some questions at times, which is rather cute, but I interject less in this one than I did in earlier recordings. I guess the question I really wanted answered by then was, “how do I operate this machine so I can make recordings for myself?”

Here’s the Hare And Guy Fawkes sound file and book cover again.

My Fifth Birthday Party, Standard 8 Home Movie & Photos, Woodfield Avenue, cAugust 1967

I’m pretty sure my fifth birthday party was not held on my birthday because so many people were going to be away late August, including us.

I vaguely recall mum telling me that it was due to be held soon after school broke up but lots of people had measles/mumps/chicken pox or whatever was doing the rounds that season, so they rescheduled the party.

So perhaps it was held in early August.

It certainly looks summery from the cine film and photos.

Dad did a pretty good job of filming this event. Not exactly taxing on his skills.

There are a few photos too – click here for the album. The cutest photo is shown below.

Mummy’s Tape, Woodfield Avenue Grundig TK-35, Mid 1960’s

Here is the entirety of Mummy’s Tape, which was recorded, during the mid 1960’s, on the family Grundig TK-35, which looked like this:

Grundig TK35, ram-packed with thermionic valves. Photograph by Michael Keller, from Rad-io.de.

There is a sorry tale of desecration with regard to a small portion of this tape, which can be found by clicking here or below:

My Very First Audio Recording & Inadvertent Desecration Of Mummy’s Tape, With Friends, Woodfield Avenue, Guessing Late 1966

Still, I only had one mummy and she only had this one tape, bless her. So I think it should be preserved for posterity, in the cloud.

Here is a link to the track listing.

And here are those tracks – the “desecration track” is the seventeenth one:

Brace yourself for the desecration interval…

…and now, back to the music:

My Very First Audio Recording & Inadvertent Desecration Of Mummy’s Tape, With Friends, Woodfield Avenue, Guessing Late 1966

This incident caused a long-term rumpus in our family. I’m not sure my mother ever forgave me for it.

I recorded about two-and-a-half minutes of childish nonsense…

…with friend or friends unspecified…

…on Mummy’s Tape.

She only had one tape, bless her, which I inadvertently desecrated that day.

Mummy’s tape comprises some of her favourite tunes and songs, recorded from various sources on the radio, probably over several years in the early to mid 1960s, around the time of my infancy.

Here is a link to the Mummy’s Tape track listing.

Just in case anyone is interested, I have also uploaded Mummy’s Tape in its entirety, within this piece – click here or below:

Mummy’s Tape, Woodfield Avenue Grundig TK-35, Mid 1960’s

Mum reckons I carried out the horrendous act of desecration when I was about four.

Here is the offending two-and-a-half minute clip.

The clip itself reveals little. I was clearly very young when I did this – I think mum’s “about four” estimate is about right. We (I am with at least one, I think probably two friends) mostly seem to be making noises to take pleasure in watching the recording level lights on the family Grundig dance.

I guess I had been carefully watching what my parents (mostly daddy) did when they recorded me stories so I could listen in their absence, click here or below for an example of that…

Daddy Reading The Gingerbread Man To Me, Guessing Late 1966

…and I thus worked out how to record through the microphone. A non-trivial matter on a Grundig TK-35 I can tell you.

Mummy never let me live this down. A well-known bearer of minor long-term grudges was my mum…and boy did this grudge come back to haunt me for the rest of her life.

For a start, precious tapes, which meant those that mum (and to some extent dad) treasured were kept in a drawer in the living room cabinet that was out of bounds to me until I was much, much older.

But more importantly, subsequent minor infringements of various kinds (and there were many) were often “bigged up” with reference to the tape desecration incident, e.g.:

“you’ve never paid due respect to my property…do you remember that time you completely ruined my tape?”

Well, of course I did and do remember the incident in the sense that I was regularly reminded of it. But I was very small when the incident occurred and have no recollection of the actual playful episode, in which, presumably, I was showing off to a friend or friends and we played with the equipment for a while…

…two-and-a-half minutes or so to be a little more precise.

All the evidence suggests that there was actus reus for the criminal damage to Mummy’s Tape, but in truth I cannot believe that there was an ounce of mens rea for desecration. I doubt if I had even understood, by that stage, the difference between a blank tape and one that had recordings on it which might, if someone surreptitiously recorded on that tape while no-one was looking, would be permanently interrupted with inappropriate material, for the rest of all time.

Indeed, there is evidence that I took pains to avoid recording over anything – there is about 40 seconds of blank space between the previous recording on the tape and the start of my childish recording – so I guess I did have a careful listen to make sure that I was recording on blank tape, not over-recording anything.

At this juncture readers, especially younger people, might wonder what on earth all the fuss was about. Suffice it to say that editing tapes was an even less trivial matter than recording them in those days, which is why most amateur recordings of that era are diffuse with blips and occasionally lengthy intervals of inappropriate material.

I guess mummy carried on recording her tape and only discovered my childish interruption later, by which time it was, in her terms, too late to rectify the problem.

She could, of course, have recorded any material of her own choosing between two-and-a-half minutes and three-and-a-quarter minutes over the space and my material to reinstate her tape as a continuous one of her preferred music…

…but it was far easier and more fitting, instead, to kvetch or broyges for several decades.

I don’t like to point the finger at anyone else in this sorry tale, but something tells me that Andy Levinson might also have been at the scene of the crime at the time; possibly Fiona also. But only I have suffered a lifetime of guilt and shame as a result of two-and-a-half minutes worth of seemingly harmless, childish fun.

Not bad technical skills on the tape recorder at the age of four though – eh readers? This is, unquestionably, my oldest surviving self-made recording; quite possibly the very first one I ever made.

Daddy Reading The Gingerbread Man To Me, Guessing Late 1966

Some bants on King Cricket today, 13 March 2017, in the matter of one of my Ged pieces as it happens – click here – have led me back to the very oldest tapes in the family collection.

Both of my parents, dad in particular, made recordings of my favourite books being read to me. This was mostly, I suspect, because they knew that I couldn’t resist fiddling with the old Grundig and so would listen to the recordings rather than nag them to read the book again. Fiendish, cunning and I very much approve.

One of those wonderful recordings is The Gingerbread Man, the very book that Joe over on King Cricket was complaining about having to read three times a day.

Always keen to help out, here is the recording of my dad reading The Gingerbread Man to a very little me:

I don’t have a picture of me around that time with that book, but I do have a picture with a similar book, long since forgotten and I don’t think ever recorded:

A Very Little Me With the Big Brown Bear Book

Simply adorable I was; goodness knows what went wrong.

I do still have my dilapidated copy of the Gingerbread Man. Not too many of my children’s books survived the cull, but (probably because of the recording) I couldn’t bear to part with that one.

Thanks for triggering the nostalgia, Joe. I’d been trying to pluck up the courage to listen again and start uploading these recordings to Ogblog. You gave me cause.

Andrew & Fiona Come To Play, Standard 8 Home Movie, Woodfield Avenue, c August 1966

This is a supremely cute little home movie, including “an outbreak of” kissing and eventually “an outbreak of” squabbling. Not quite a Tarrantino ending but…

…I certainly sense Dad’s cinematographic machinations all over this piece – good on him.

It was filmed at our house.

I’m no expert on children’s ages, but although mum and dad guessed summer of 1967 (making me and Andrew about 5 and Fiona about 4), from reviewing other materials (photos and cine), I think this one might be a year earlier, 1966, with me and Andrew around 4 and Fiona 3.

https://youtu.be/mNreJ-zLdDA

I’m pretty sure the birthday party film – click here – is 1967 and I think we look a little older in that one – although no less cute.

The Day The England Football Team Won The World Cup Final, Nunu’s House, 30 July 1966

There are very few dates from the early part of my life for which I can write a dated Ogblog piece.

But family folklore, even from a virtually-sports-free household like my parents’ home, kept the memory of this day alive for me.

My parents had been invited to a “watch the final party” in the street – Woodfield Avenue in Streatham. I suspect it was at the house with the biggest TV and my guess is that would have been the Benjamins at No 36 or the Levinsons at No 42; probably the former.

Me, Fiona & Andrew Levinson, probably “that summer”.

Goodness only knows what the other parents did with their children, but the party was to be an adults only affair and mum wanted our cleaner, Mrs Nugent, aka Nunu, to babysit for me.

Strangely, Nunu and her family also wanted to watch the final, but they were willing (possibly even keen) to have a toddler – me – with them. So basically I was bundled off to Nunu’s house. I think it was in Tooting.

For reasons that I am unable to fathom, it seems that my hosts, the Nugent family, were not interested in making a fuss of me to their usual level. I tolerated this for a while, but towards the end of the second half of the match I started to seek more Nugent attention than was forthcoming.

I don’t think Ted Nugent was among them, but I might be mistaken

Mr Nugent, perhaps unwisely with the benefit of hindsight, told me that the match would be over any minute and that we would soon indulge in activity more to my taste. At that point everyone was in a good mood. England were leading 2-1.

They thought it was all over…

…but unfortunately for me and for the Nugent family, an inconsiderate West German (named Wolfgang Webber, I now learn) scored a 90th minute goal, levelling the match.

So when someone from the Nugent family broke it to me that the match was not in fact over as scheduled but that there was to be a further 30 minutes of play, to which they wanted to devote their almost undivided attention…

…I am told this did not go down too well with me.

And quite right too. Why can’t these idiots conclude their football matches on time as promised? Daft sport.

Anyway, the rest is history. An hour or so later all was smiles, celebrations and cup presentations.

I never really did reconcile myself with soccer football after that.

But the strange thing is, my preferred sports, cricket and tennis, tend to have matches that last much longer than soccer matches, with score-related, i.e. temporally-indeterminate breaks and endings.

Go figure.

Battersea Park Open Air Sculpture Exhibition, Spring/Summer 1966

It is one of my earliest memories. All I remember is having so much fun, climbing in, out, around, and through sculptures.

Playing hide and seek by dint of the artworks.

In my memory it was a Henry Moore exhibition, but on discovering a little pile of long-forgotten photographs (fiendishly mixed up with some of my parents’ late 1980s prints), followed by a little on-line research, I learn that it was a much wider exhibition, organised by the Greater London Council (GLC), that Battersea Park affair in 1966.

Not only Henry Moore & Barbara Hepworth but also F. E. McWilliam, Bernard Meadows, Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Anthony Caro, Hubert Dalwood, William Turnbull, John Hoskin, Brian Wall, Phillip King, David Hall, David Annesley, Kim Lim and David Smith…apparently. I doubt if the three-going-on-four-ish version of me took all of that in.

The exhibition was thoroughly reviewed by Norman Lynton in The Guardian that May…

Norman Lynton on Battersea Sculpture Sat, May 21, 1966 – 7 · The Guardian (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com

…and by Nigel Gosling in the Observer the next day:

Gosling On Battersea Park Sun, May 22, 1966 – 24 · The Observer (London, Greater London, England) · Newspapers.com

My guess is that we, the Harris family, ventured to the exhibition the following weekend, the late May Bank Holiday, although it’s possible that it was later that summer, perhaps the August Bank Holiday.

The reason I suspect it was the earlier holiday is because the photos look to me as though dad wanted those pictures from that exhibition to use as examples for his photographic studio classes that spring and summer.

Dad’s shop and studio was in St John’s Hill, Battersea.

Such a photogenic exhibition up the other end of Battersea would have been too good an opportunity to miss in those days, when (as I understand it) the studio was still a key part of dad’s business.

Anyway, that was dad’s job. My job was having fun.

The “pictures for the studio” theory would also explain why I hadn’t seen the pictures before now. Dad probably rescued those prints from the shop when he closed down the shop in the mid 1980s and the packet got mixed up then with mum and dads holiday snaps from the late 1980s. The negatives, sadly, seem lost.

Still, it was quite extraordinary seeing these pictures when I discovered them in March 2021, nearly 55 years after the event.

I have such a strong memory of having a wonderful time that day in Battersea Park and the pictures bear that out.

I have a feeling that mum didn’t really approve of this “let the children play” style exhibition. I can imagine there was a view in a fairly large section of the public that such sculptural works are to be revered rather than toyed with by children.

Mum doesn’t look 100% sure. I look sure.

But I think such exhibitions are a superb idea.

Personally, I have always been drawn to sculpture. Perhaps my fondness for sculpture would have happened anyway. But something tells me that my love of sculpture was forged that day in Battersea Park, which I so clearly remember as being just the most amazing fun.

You can see all the pictures (there are only eleven, most are shown in this piece) in Flickr by clicking here or below:

A Trio Of Firsts: My First Pictorial Appearance In A Newspaper, Almost Certainly My First Performance In A Show & “My First Girlfriend”, May 1966

My mum kept certain things and threw lots of things away. Two artefacts from an event at Nightingale survived the sands of time and mum’s occasional “mad-on” clear-outs across the decades.

The above clipping from the Jewish Chronicle is dated 27 May 1966.

Children of the Yavneh Jewish Kindergarten [based at Brixton Shule], presenting fruits for Shavuot at the Home For Aged Jews, Wandsworth [now named Nightingale House]

What a wonderful way to entrench the Jewish festival of Shavuot into the hearts and minds of the little children. Except, that, as history showed 50+ years later, it didn’t work on me and at least one other of the attendees:

A Winning Day, Culminating At Bill’s For A “Shavuot Not” BBYO Youth Club Regathering: , 1 June 2017

The Play’s The Thing…

The document below provides more detail about the event, which was presumably held a few days before the date of the newspaper notice:

A better quality picture, clearly from the same event. But Reuben Turner’s note hopes that people “will enjoy the play”. My guess is that he used a picture from the Shavuot event in his promotion letter for a play that was put on some days or weeks later.

I can only wonder at what the play might have been – perhaps a depiction of the traditional Shavuot story – The Book of Ruth.

*Naomi entreating Ruth and Orpah to return to the land of Moab*. *William Blake, actually. Not Reubens…and not Turner*

But in any case, what a cast!

The picture with Mr Turner’s letter has survived better, enabling me to identify several of the youngsters. I cannot name the adults in the picture – I’d hazard a guess that the man is Reuben Turner. The picture of the woman looks disconcertingly like my dad in drag, but I don’t think that was the case.

I am pretty sure I can name several of the kids, working from right to left…

…oy, so I must have learnt something at Yavneh…

Sara Monty [fairly sure] (standing);
Me (standing);
Sandra Corbman (sitting);
Maxine [Camlish?] (sitting);
Eve Cedar (standing);
Boy I cannot name (standing);
Girl I cannot name (sitting);
Jonathan Davies (standing);
Girl I cannot name (sitting);
Girl I cannot name (standing);
Jonathan Gold [fairly sure] (sitting);
Half a girl I can barely see, let alone name (standing).

Any help that a reader might offer to help fill in the gaps and/or pass this relic on to those who were in it would be much appreciated.

If anyone out there remembers anything at all about the show, I’d love to know. But it might well be that my love of theatre started there, 58 years ago as I write in 2024.

“My First Girlfriend”

I have very little recollection of my time at Yavneh Kindergarten, other than an impressionistic sense that I was happy there most of the time and that the experience did its job of preparing me to start school that autumn.

My only tangible memory is one that has been handed down to me by my mum, who used to take great pleasure in relating the following story in circumstances that might cause me maximum embarrassment.

One day, when my father asked me, as oft he would, to “report on the events of the day at Kindergarten”, I proudly announced:

I’ve got a girlfriend. She’s called Sandra.

When asked for more detail about my girlfriend, I stated that:

…we roll in the barrel together.

Whether my parents were able to keep a straight face at the time, and if so, how, I’ll never know.

As it happens, Sandra and I never did go out with one another, but we spent a fair chunk of our youth together through BBYO in Streatham and are still very much in touch to this day. Indeed Sandra was one of the Shavuot avoiders at our 2017 regathering and I expect to see her at the 2024 regathering about 10 days after this piece is published…

…if she is still speaking to me by then!

Update: Sandra Responds…

Brilliant stuff Ian. I also have some memories of being happy there but unfortunately I don’t remember the barrel.

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The Play’s The Thing…

“My First Girlfriend”

Update: Sandra Responds…

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